Feature

Far From Men's David Oelhoffen and Warren Ellis on Viggo Mortensen, displacement, and scoring westerns with Nick Cave

David Oelhoffen's fine Far From Men was one of the standouts of the French Film Festival earlier in the year, with audiences responding to the understated western's themes of honour, duty and displacement. It stars Viggo Mortensen as Daru, a school teacher living a quiet life in a remote Algerian village, on the eve of the outbreak of civil war. A local lawman comes calling and tasks the reliable Daru with the thankless job of transporting an Arab prisoner (Reda Kateb) to his trial and certain death.

Oelhoffen directs this adaptation of Albert Camus’ The Visitor with a quiet dignity, set against a score by unconventional Western aficionados Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

In the clip above, Oelhoffen and Ellis explore the themes at play in the text, and Ellis explains why he and Nick Cave like to take leave from their day jobs occasionally to score westerns.

Ellis explains, "the music is always so important, but with this film in particular, it was important not to turn it into something else because it could quickly become just, you know, two blokes in the desert..."

Oelhoffen took a few liberties from the source material, so as to emphasise the men's shared expierience as 'outsiders'.

"It’s a big change with the short story by Albert Camus – in the short story Daru has a very clear identity and is French - Pied-Noir. I thought it was a good idea to change the character and make him an outsider among the Algerians. The short story is focussed on Daru’s dilemma, there's a lot about the death penalty and the film is focussed on the relationship between the two characters. To make them equal, I thought it was a good idea to make them both outsiders.

"In the film Daru is not French anymore – he’s a guy of Spanish descent – still European of course but he's not considered 'French' within the community. He’s also Algerian but is not considered 'Algerian' by the villagers – he's really somebody between two communities. I thought it was not a good idea to propose this part to a French actor, so with producers we begin to think for a foreign actor. I knew Viggo Mortensen spoke perfect Spanish because he grew up in Argentina and lives in Spain. He's absolutely fluent, it's his mother language. But I didn’t know at that moment that he could also speak French, until Matthew, one of the producers, sent me a clip of Viggo giving a tribute to hockey player Guy Lafleur.

"So it's all thanks to Guy Lafleur that we had the idea to contact Viggo Mortensen!"

Source: SBS Movies

We met and he was on board, but he asked for one thing – it was to have time to prepare himself for playing an Algerian, he has a lot of dialogue in Algerian, and he also wanted to improve his French accent, its rhythm, the pace of speaking, and he had a Quebecois accent, he wanted time to work on it.

Fiona Williams travelled to Paris to interview David Oelhoffen and Warren Ellis as a guest of Unifrance.